CHICAGO CLOSE-UP

Out to L.A., with his MBA

August 14, 2009|By Nina Metz, SPECIAL TO THE TRIBUNE

If you follow the boulevard of broken dreams far enough, it bottoms out in Hollywood, where rejection and failure jostle for space alongside hundreds of thousands of movie scripts that will never, ever get made.

For the aspiring filmmaker, that's not a good final destination. Sometimes, a counterintuitive approach is in order.

So, how does a guy with zero experience and not a single contact break into the movie biz? Believe it or not, an MBA might be the ticket. It worked for one guy.

Lincolnwood native Marc Fienberg, 39, didn't attend film school. After a career in e-commerce and financial services, he quit his job five years ago and moved with his wife and baby to Los Angeles, where they had no connections, professional or otherwise: "Everybody thought we were crazy."

Oddly enough, it was his business degree from Northwestern that helped Fienberg make his first feature film.

"It definitely helps raise the money and helps you talk the talk to investors," he told me during a trip home to promote "Play the Game," a romantic comedy that opens Aug. 28 in Chicago. (Check back in two weeks for Michael Phillips' review.)

Fienberg is the screenwriter; he is the film's director and producer as well.

Here's how he did it.

The film is based partly on Fienberg's bachelor years in Lincoln Park, where he and his grandfather were single and looking for love.

"I started off just as a writer, and I tried to sell the script. When that didn't work, I realized, well, I can raise money just as easily as these other independent producers." The budget is reportedly in the $3 million range.

"My investors want to make money on the film; they weren't the type [who] just wanted to make a movie for the sake of making a movie, so it helped that they knew someone with a financial background -- that I knew how to make a profit on a business and had done it before -- was bringing the project to them.

"Once I raised the money, I realized, hey, that makes me the producer, and I get to decide who's going to direct, and I thought, 'Nobody's going to direct it as well as I am.'"

His experience behind the camera is slim: "This is my first film, but I did make a couple of short films just as practice to sort of dip my toe in the water. They're terrible short films, but it gave me enough experience to feel confident walking onto a set with Andy Griffith and Doris Roberts." Newbie or not, Fienberg did snare recognizable names. The cast also includes Marla Sokoloff ("The Practice").

Cynics can rest easy. Fienberg is self-distributing, which costs yet more dough that he has to raise. And consider this acknowledgment: "It was difficult even with the MBA, I have to say -- more difficult than I ever expected, and the sacrifices I had to make were much bigger than I ever expected." He and his wife now have four children.

"It's not easy," he says. "We live in a tiny little apartment, and we live a very frugal lifestyle."

Bike Cinema

Cyclists belong to subculture all their own, and the Bicycle Film Festival -- which comes to Chicago this weekend -- is the cinematic equivalent of the cyclist's scrapbook. Films include "Where Are You Go" (Friday), which documents the world's longest bike race, called the Tour d' Afrique, traversing from Cairo to Cape Town. On Saturday catch a screening of "I Love My Bicycle: The Story of FBM Bikes," about how the BMX company started in the early '70s (FBM stands for Fat Bald Men) as a small-business antidote to big corporations. For more info about the fest (which includes after-parties) go to bicyclefilmfestival.com.

'Mystery Science' Reprise

"Plan 9 from Outer Space" (1959) will get the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" treatment Thursday at AMC River East. They're calling it RiffTrax Live -- in other words, the live version of RiffTrax.com's DVD commentaries. Notorious for its awfulness, the film will be screened along with live riffing from Crow T. Robot and his "MST3000" cast mates, beamed in high-def from a theater in Nashville. For more info, go to fathomevents.com.